Betchel pointed out that technology should be used for patients' benefits -- improving their experience and health outcomes.

"It's easy to use technology to just automate our current health care system. But our current health care system doesn't really consistently deliver the highest possible quality care to patients," she said.


We can think about technology, Bechtel said, in a way that doesn't just automate the paper, but rather focuses on using technology to enable patients to be more active participants in their care, and to enable doctors to deliver the highest quality of care based on having much better information--as well as other functions such as clinical decision support and population health management.

How does meaningful use help the consumer? "It will help give them better and more timely access to their own health information, help them by giving them educational resources to understand what that information means and how to use it; to coordinate their care and improve their health outcomes. It will mean patients getting reminders about preventive care or follow-up care; we often get reminders from our veterinarians or dentists but not our primary care physicians. This will help patients get those reminders so they can stay on top of things." Meaningful use will also help patients get care that more meets evidence-based guidelines, care that reflects state-of-the-art science, Bechtel pointed out. "What research and evidence tell us today about how a certain treatment is a best practice for providing care, will then take about 17 years for that treatment to really get into practice on a daily basis. So health IT will help us as a country to take that medical knowledge that we are developing in science and research, and integrate that into care for patients today on a much faster time line."

Medical Institution Perspective

Phyllis Teater is Chief Information Officer, Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus, OH. She spoke to DOTmed about the issues that institutions face with meeting meaningful use and receiving incentive funding, as discussed in her testimony, which could help significantly with physicians' ability to meet productivity and hidden costs.

Large medical centers, Teater explained, often have multiple institutions, and to bring them all up on the electronic medical records is very difficult and costly. "Right now, we cannot be reimbursed for separate institutions; incrementally they are all counted as one. So the incentives that are available are somewhat difficult for large institutions to deal with--particularly for academic medical centers, which tend to be large." This is because CMS does not provide for differential reimbursement for different parts of the institution. All the campuses in a system are under one Medicare provider number. "That really puts large institutions at a disadvantage. I thought the testimony was a good opportunity for different perspectives to be shared with the members of the Committee."

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